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“What are you doing to me, lady?”
“There are five chambers in this revolver. Only one of them is loaded. On the first trigger pull, there is an eighty percent chance the hammer will come down on an unloaded chamber. To be honest with you, I don’t feel good about tormenting a man whose hands are taped behind his back. I’ll start the process, and maybe you’ll do the right thing and our situation will be over. If not, we’ll have to take it from there. You with me so far?”
“No,” he said, swallowing as he spoke.
She pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Airweight against the side of her head and squeezed the trigger. Her face jerked when the hammer snapped on an empty chamber. She heard Wyatt release his breath. “Miss Gretchen, don’t do that again,” he said.
“It’s your turn,” she said to Zappa.
“Lady, don’t do this to me,” he said.
“The chances are one in four that the next chamber is loaded. That means you have a seventy-five percent chance of being okay. Are you following me?”
“You’re going too fast.”
She touched the barrel to his temple and cocked back the hammer.
“Please,” he said. “You don’t know everything involved. I didn’t have a choice.”
“About hitting a man in the head with a baton?” she said. “About gang-raping a woman? You didn’t have a choice about that? You’re starting to piss me off.”
“Kill me. I don’t care.” Tears were welling in his eyes. “I saw pictures of what this guy has done. Go online. Somebody sold them to a guy who makes snuff films. Maybe it was the guy who sold them.”
“What guy? What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. I’m a gardener!” He squeezed his eyes shut and kicked his feet and ground his teeth.
Gretchen heard the roar of a truck engine on the other side of the wall, followed by someone pounding on the door and shouting: “Hey, asshole! Your Harley is being towed! Come outside and see how it’s being towed!”
Gretchen pulled back the curtain and looked outside. The clerk had backed up a wrecker to the handicap zone and attached a steel hook and cable around the Harley and hoisted it into the air so it was hanging at an angle, upside down, the handlebars and gas tank and engine partially on the concrete parking pad.
“Did you hear me, shit-breath?” the clerk shouted, pounding the door again. “I want to thank you for helping me quit this job! Put your plunger back in your pants and watch the show!”
The clerk climbed into the cab of the wrecker and shifted into gear and clanked forward into the street, dragging the Harley over the curb and banging it against a light pole. Then he gave the wrecker the gas and roared down Broadway, the Harley bouncing end over end, skittering off a fireplug, metal screeching, sparks geysering in the dark as he made a wide turn at the intersection.
Gretchen and Wyatt were standing at the window, dumbfounded, the curtain peeled back. “I don’t believe this,” she said.
“This ain’t too good, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said.
The reversal of their situation was not over. Behind them, Tony Zappa picked himself up from the floor, wobbled once or twice, and charged through the side window, smashing through the curtain and glass, the chair on his back, landing on the gravel slope behind the building. Upon impact, the chair splintered into sticks, and in seconds he was running across the rocks along the river’s edge, his wrists still taped behind him, his ripped shirt streaming in rags.
“Time to get out of Dodge, Wyatt,” she said.
“I got to tell you something, Miss Gretchen. I don’t like what you done, snapping the gun at your head like that. It froze my heart up. You shouldn’t ought to do that, even if you was pretending. You was pretending, right?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “You’re a good fellow, Wyatt. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”
His face resembled a clay sculpture, his glasslike eyes absent of any emotion she could detect. She held her eyes on his. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“That smile of yours, it’s the light of the world,” he said. “You got the prettiest smile in the history of smiles, woman.”
GROWING UP IN the old Irish Channel, down by Tchoupitoulas, Clete Purcel heard older boys and men share their knowledge about the opposite sex. He heard the same wisdom in the Marine Corps and from fellow cops and any number of newsmen and barroom personalities and frequenters of pool rooms and sports parlors. All spoke with authority about the rewards and perils of romance and gave the listener the sense that they had women of every stripe at their disposal. These great authorities on sexual relationships knew every detail about the joys of copulation as well as some of the pitfalls, which they reduced to the cynical and succinct statements that entertain the readers of pulp fiction and please those who have the thinking powers of earthworms. Here are a few bits of bedroom wisdom passed by these wise and worldly men:
1) Don’t go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you.
2) Divorcées and widows can’t get enough.
3) Catholic girls are better in the sack because they’re full of guilt and stay on rock and roll right down to the finish line.
